The Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS) at the
Daresbury Laboratory
Daresbury Laboratory is a scientific research laboratory based at Sci-Tech Daresbury campus near Daresbury in Halton, Cheshire, England. The laboratory began operations in 1962 and was officially opened on 16 June 1967 as the Daresbury Nuclear ...
in
Cheshire
Cheshire ( ) is a ceremonial and historic county in North West England, bordered by Wales to the west, Merseyside and Greater Manchester to the north, Derbyshire to the east, and Staffordshire and Shropshire to the south. Cheshire's county tow ...
, England was the first second-generation
synchrotron radiation
Synchrotron radiation (also known as magnetobremsstrahlung radiation) is the electromagnetic radiation emitted when relativistic charged particles are subject to an acceleration perpendicular to their velocity (). It is produced artificially in ...
source to produce X-rays.
The research facility provided synchrotron radiation to a large number of experimental stations and had an operating cost of approximately £20 million per annum.
SRS had been operated by the
Science and Technology Facilities Council
The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is a United Kingdom government agency that carries out research in science and engineering, and funds UK research in areas including particle physics, nuclear physics, space science and astro ...
. The SRS was closed on 4 August 2008 after 28 years of operation.
History
Following the closure of the
NINA Nina may refer to:
* Nina (name), a feminine given name and surname
Acronyms
* National Iraqi News Agency, a news service in Iraq
* Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, on the campus of Norwegian University of Science and Technology
* No income ...
synchrotron, construction of the facility commenced in 1975 and the first experiments were completed using the facility by 1981.
In 1986 the storage ring was upgraded with additional focusing to increase the output brightness, the new 'lattice' being termed the HBL (High Brightness Lattice).
Design and evolution
Like all second-generation sources, the SRS was designed to produce synchrotron radiation principally from its
dipole
In physics, a dipole () is an electromagnetic phenomenon which occurs in two ways:
*An electric dipole deals with the separation of the positive and negative electric charges found in any electromagnetic system. A simple example of this system ...
magnets, but the initial design foresaw the use of a high-field
insertion device to provide shorter-wavelength electromagnetic radiation to particular users.
The first storage ring design was a 2
GeV FODO lattice consisting of alternating focussing and defocussing
quadrupoles
A quadrupole or quadrapole is one of a sequence of configurations of things like electric charge or current, or gravitational mass that can exist in ideal form, but it is usually just part of a multipole expansion of a more complex structure refl ...
, with one dipole following every quadrupole (i.e. two dipoles per repeating cell), giving a natural
beam emittance
In accelerator physics, emittance is a property of a charged particle beam. It refers to the area occupied by the beam in a position-and-momentum phase space.
Each particle in a beam can be described by its position and momentum along each of ...
of around 1000 nm-rad with 16 cells.
The HBL upgrade implemented in 1986 increased the total number of quadrupoles to 32, whilst retaining the same number of cells and geometry, and reduced the operating emittance to around 100 nm-rad in the so-called 'HIQ' (high tune) configuration. A 'LOQ' (low tune) configuration was also provided, to allow the efficient storage of one intense bunch of electrons (instead of up to 160), to provide radiation bursts at 3.123 MHz (the revolution frequency of the electrons, corresponding to the 96 m circumference).
Scientific Output and Achievements
The SRS supported a broad range of science, including pioneering work on X-ray diffraction, structural molecular biology, surface physics and chemistry, materials science and upper atmosphere physics. Following its closure, a detailed study of the economic impact of the SRS was made.
Two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry have been received by scientists who performed part of their prize-winning research using the SRS: Sir
John E. Walker
Sir John Ernest Walker One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 7 January 1941) is a British chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1997. Walker is Emeritus Director an ...
in 1997 for his contribution to the understanding of the synthesis of ATP
(Adenosine Triphosphate), a key component of the body’s energy transport, and
Sir Venki Ramakrishnan for his work on the structure and function of the
Ribosome
Ribosomes ( ) are macromolecular machines, found within all cells, that perform biological protein synthesis (mRNA translation). Ribosomes link amino acids together in the order specified by the codons of messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules to fo ...
,
the molecular machine that constructs
protein
Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including catalysing metabolic reactions, DNA replication, res ...
s from ‘instructions’ coded in
mRNA
In molecular biology, messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a single-stranded molecule of RNA that corresponds to the genetic sequence of a gene, and is read by a ribosome in the process of synthesizing a protein.
mRNA is created during the ...
. Over 5000 academic papers were produced.
See also
*
Diamond Light Source
References
External links
Synchrotron Radiation SourceArticles on the history of the SRS
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Research institutes in Cheshire
Science and Technology Facilities Council
Synchrotron radiation facilities